House and Garden 
and which, after her death, had been pur¬ 
chased for Philip by his ambassador at that 
court. 
Six rooms were set apart as the king’s suite 
of apartments, and four were reserved for the 
use of his queen, Isabella Farnese, of Parma. 
The rest of the building was appropriated 
to the use of the royal household, and ample 
provision was made for the service of religion, 
and for the accommodation of the attend¬ 
ants of the court and the work people. 
The work on the gardens and landscape 
architecture kept 
pace with the con¬ 
struction of the 
buildings, though 
the changes under¬ 
taken were of much 
greater propor¬ 
tions. 
The abundance 
of water, and the 
height at which it 
first came to the 
surface, permitted 
the establishment 
of reservoirs at a 
considerable eleva¬ 
tion. The chief 
one, an artificial 
lake to which was 
given the preten¬ 
tious name of El 
Mar, was placed 
so high—two hun¬ 
dred feet above the 
level of the palace 
—as to give enough 
pressure to throw 
jets of water high 
into the air from 
many piped fountains in its descent to the 
lower altitudes. 
The streams which had once wandered at 
will through La Granja as open brooks, were 
now largely conducted underground, com¬ 
ing to the surface occasionally as bubbling 
cascades, losing themselves again to reappear 
unexpectedly and supply some fountain or 
to form a stepped cascade, leading toward 
the palace over ever lower basins. The 
glorious plane trees were so placed and 
tended as to produce shaded groves, in the 
midst of which fountains played, glittering 
as the rays of the sun fell upon them through 
the trees. 
Only near the terrace did there appear 
reminiscent of royal Versailles the parterre, 
and the grand walk looking away across beds 
of flowers and sheets of water, the vista 
terminating in the everywhere dominant 
mountains. 
Here and there on these lower levels, statues 
and vases lined the avenues where the border¬ 
ing trees were planted formally, and walks 
led from fountain 
to fountain, whose 
artificiality con¬ 
trasted strongly 
with the entourage 
of hills, rocks and 
pines whose only 
gardener had been 
Dame Nature. 
But the unique 
and crowning glory 
of La Granja was 
the fountains, for 
which Versailles 
gave the sugges¬ 
tion, but which far 
outshone their 
original. No tur¬ 
bid puddle forced 
up by noisy pump¬ 
ing engines sup¬ 
plied the liquid 
element, but a 
crystal mountain 
stream fresh from 
the wild heights of 
Guadarrama here 
flashed and laugh¬ 
ed and glistened as 
if, after bondage underground, it rejoiced to 
greet once more the fresh, pure air in the 
Cascada Cenador, which, under the glist¬ 
ening sun and the azure Castilian sky, glitters 
like molten silver, reflecting later in its 
quieter pools, the deep, cool shade of over¬ 
arching boughs. 
Philip’s landscape gardening, when com¬ 
pleted, covered an area of three hundred and 
sixty acres. He gave to the task a constant, 
loving supervision, and the work itself and 
the after contemplation of it formed one of 
THE BASKET FOUNTAIN 
